As summer draws to a close, I decided I was in the mood for one more road-trip novel.
Winnie M. Li’s “What We Left Unsaid” proved to be a great choice about three estranged siblings working through their differences while also driving along one of the greatest American road-trip routes: Route 66 from Chicago to L.A.
At the start of the novel, Taiwanese-American siblings Bonnie, Kevin and Alex Chu don’t have much reason to talk to each other anymore, and they’re mostly OK with that.
The trio have drastically different personalities and have made very different life choices, and now their busy lives make it all too easy to avoid thinking about each other at all.
All that changes when they get an urgent phone call from their father.
Their mother has suffered a stroke and wants to talk to them all immediately.
It’s no big surprise that she wants her three children to come visit her as soon as possible.
What is a surprise, though, is how she wants them to get there.
Rather than flying in from their current home cities, she wants them to hit the road together.
First, they’ll stop by the Grand Canyon, and then they’ll continue on to California to see her before she undergoes a significant surgery.
Why the Grand Canyon?
The Chu family almost made it there 30 years ago, when a family road trip was abruptly derailed by a roadside stop that went badly wrong.
The Chu parents turned the car around afterward, but even years later, the family has never talked about why or what happened that day.
As Bonnie, Kevin and Alex set out on their epic road trip, piecing together their separate memories of that day will be a crucial part of repairing their relationships with one another and understanding their mother’s motivations.
The siblings’ differences seem vast.
Bonnie married into a rich New England family and is raising two boys on a huge estate.
Kevin has gone into insurance and is having a bit of a mid-life crisis, one that includes a potentially life-ruining secret.
Alex, the youngest of the three, is also the one most isolated from the rest of the family.
She flies in from London with news to share but is unsure how her family will receive it: Not only has she gotten married to Nya, a Black woman, but the two are expecting their first child.
As the group drives across the country, they stop by various Route 66 landmarks and meet a wide variety of Americans, some of whom are welcoming to the trio of Asian-American siblings and some of whom are decidedly less so.
Following along on this iconic road trip and experiencing it through the eyes of American travelers who are sometimes treated as welcome guests and sometimes as outsiders made for a really compelling and thought-provoking read.
As they drive, the Chus also have a lot of conversations about the past and present, including the places where their outlooks on the world clash.
These clashes are especially an issue for Kevin, a Trump voter who initially thought Alex’s coming out was just one more way for his overly dramatic sister to seek attention, and Alex, who is still wounded by careless remarks Kevin made years earlier and who has found herself looking at a lot of American history with new eyes thanks to her marriage to Nya.
At times, the book gets a little heavy-handed — the group just happening to come across a standoff between Confederate flag supporters and a Black Lives Matter protest in Branson, Mo., is one example — but the rich character development makes up for that. I quickly found myself rooting for all three of the Chu siblings to work past the pain of the past and come together for both their mother’s sake and their own.
Though serious conversations are definitely a big part of the story, Li includes enough lighthearted escapades, humor and inspiring descriptions of the natural beauty encountered along the way to keep things from feeling too heavy.
I recommend “What We Left Unsaid” to anyone in the mood for a travel story with real heart, likeable complex characters, and a hopeful take on our ability to mend what’s been broken.